With the slow news cycle, we’ve been doing some much needed maintenance around Stately Beat Manor — trimming unread email lists, pruning RSS feeds, and so on. We’ve also been pondering our commenting system. We’ve recently put a few posters on “time out” because they were basically rude, insulting brigands, and we don’t like their kind. Biting wit and a droll put-down is fine. Name calling and invective is not.

Frankly, we’re always amazed when we go out and meet all the smart, talented people who read the Beat daily — we’d love to get some of those folks to comment more but it might require a complete overhaul of the commenting system. Also, it’s always been our observation that the better the modding, the better the commenting, and we don’t have the time it probably requires.